SEptember 20th Razor: RR Hawk V3 OC Blade: Schick Proline (2) Brush: Heritage Collection dubl duck/gelled boar Pre-shave: PAA Mentholated Cube Soap: Stirling Pumpkin Spice Stirling Orange Chill Witch Hazel Stirling Glacial Balm AS: Stirling Pumpkin Spice Stirling SEptember Great shave to start the day! Three passes for near BBS. One chin weeper and the associated hotspot from the alum. Much better results from the brush today but still room for improvement. I loaded directly from the puck this morning. Longer load time than usual resulting in enough lather to get the job done with just a bit left to wash down the drain. Have a great day! Sent from my SM-G965U using Tapatalk
A nasty cut ruined my shave this morning from being a Topper(TOTWE). Everything was going fine-great first pass(I should have stopped with the first). I got s good amount of soap(CTS Grandpa's Barbershop)loaded on to the Crown King brush. At the second pass I got the cut, right on my upper lip. Looked a little scary, like a boxer had clocked me with a left jab. I continued on with the shave, not wanting to let the cut get in the way of my progress. The rest of the shave went well....The Clubman A.S. was a nice finisher....course there was that extra sting when I covered both ends of Porcupine Alley with it. This one reduces to Pretty Excellent. (That's how nasty the cut was). On an unrelated note, I broke out the first of my ManHands Soap(s). It's the Cut&Shave-the "Clubman of ManHands". It's nice, but I'm not sure I'd repurchase that one. Meanwhile, Doc Squatch, e-mailed for a comment on my Pine Tar. I told them I haven't yet used it, but look forward to.
Good morning to you Gary. I haven't had a "Pretty Excellent" shave in a long time. Got to get better than that!!
Oh, they will be. Just a few hundred yards up the road from us. Still undecided whether it'll be a good or bad. They won't just drop in unannounced, so that's not a worry. I'm more concerned for my wife's sake. They're moving close by so that we can help them more. I'm just afraid that once they are so close, they're going to try to demand too much from my wife.
SOTD SUNDAY MORNING, SEPTEMBER 20, 2020 Today’s shave deserves to be framed. I spent yesterday afternoon applying some of the honing principles my son, Ben, has taught me. I began with the Imperia La Roccia (ILR) stone I nationalized from Ben’s rock garden. Worked up a slurry on the ILR after first lapping it with Ben’s coarse Atoma diamond plate and followed with a tomo nagura slurry stone and kept gradually diluting the created slurry until I was working with just water and the blade began to stick. I then spent about an hour with the UF side of my jasper stone and plain water until the blade again began to stick. Three pasted stroppings (0.5, 0.25, 0.1) and 30 strokes on the leather paddle strop and the blade began to resemble my Diamond Hayashi Nichiri Tokusen Silver Steel Razor’s edge under 200x magnification. The pattern is not identical because the steel’s different, but the smoothness is evident as is the slightly more acute angle as I did not use tape on the spine. I just can’t stop grinning after today’s mug shave. Yesterday’s shave was ok, and many would be happy with it. Maybe it’s just the fact that I rebuilt the edge by increasing the angle slightly and smoothing it out. Despite the slight stubble, the blade floated through the MWF lather both above and below the jawline. The weep from yesterday reopened, but the MWF lather did its thing and by the end of the first ATG pass was no longer bleeding. The second and final XTG pass put the baby in the velveteen cradle. My greatest learning which was truly freeing was recognizing that my straight shave was just that and need not mirror many of the straight shaving exemplars on YT. It was Jared Connerty’s video and his unconventional - at least according the others I’d viewed - two handed blade hold on an ATG neck pass that helped me realize it's my shave, freeing me up to use a variety of unconventional holds. After that great mug shave, I loaded the RR Hawk V3 with a fresh palm-stropped Feather Super and had at it. The huge 26mm Two Band Badger ferrule in the Alpha Shaving T-400 Tribute brush worked up a rich, yogurty, slick lather. Applying the lather with this huge rush really felt good and just contributed to what turned out to be a truly paradigm-shifting shave. Particularly so when my mug shave feels so much closer than my dome shave. I had this same experience two days ago with the Feather DX. Now don’t get me wrong, I do believe that technique trumps tools. It just appears to me in retrospect that the infinitely flexible angles afforded the open edge shaver do provide a leg up technique wise when compared to the fixed angle built into a safety razor. I’ll have to think some more on this recognition. Maybe I just experienced my first Kuhnian Shaving paradigm shift! In any case I feel velveteen, clean and refreshed on this beautiful morning in Philadelphia! RAZOR: Riga Razor 7/8 (Mug), RazoRock SS Hawk V3 (Dome) BLADE: Feather Super PREP: Cold water rinse followed by Argan Oil BRUSH: Alpha Shaving T-400 Tribute w/ 26mm Two Band Badger Ferrule SOAP: Mitchell’s Wool Fat POSTSHAVE: Cold water wash with brush squeezings followed by Humphreys Lilac WH and Osage Rub. Finished with Alt-Innsbruck and A&E Post-Shave Serum.
